1. Field of the Present Invention
The present invention relates generally to estimating the effectiveness of advertisements delivered by mobile communication device, and, in particular, to the use of a locational tracking system to monitor the movement of a mobile communication device after an advertisement has been downloaded and displayed to a user of the device.
2. Background
As rich feature set mobile communication devices, such as modern cellular telephones and other mobile phones, have gained in popularity, they have increasingly become an advertising medium. As with any advertising medium, it is often desirable to know the effectiveness of advertisements disseminated via mobile communication device. For example, advertisers prefer to know how effective an ad is likely to be before agreeing to pay the cost of an advertisement, and advertising distributors prefer to know how effective an ad is likely to be in order to set the price of the advertisement.
Advertisers and advertisement distributors alike also prefer to target advertisements at particular consumers. For example, local advertisers frequently prefer to target local consumers, and have little interest in targeting consumers that are too geographically distant to be interested in the advertised products or services.
Not surprisingly, as it has recently become more common to provide the ability to determine or track the location of various mobile communication devices such as through the use of conventional Global Positioning System (“GPS”) technology, the use of geospatially-targeted advertising campaigns for mobile communication devices has become feasible. In other words, a user of a mobile communication device may now be targeted with advertisements based on the locality of the mobile communication device. However, little has been developed in the way of validation techniques, whereby the effectiveness of advertisements delivered via mobile communication device is measured or otherwise determined, for such advertising. While a user's response to an advertisement can still be judged by monitoring whether they browse to an advertiser's web link (a “click-thru”), many mobile users will simply get the information they need directly from an advertisement (location, time, etc.) and travel to that location. In such a situation, and in many others, it can be quite difficult to correlate the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of the advertisement with the user's actions.
Thus, a need exists for techniques, particularly based on geospatial information pertaining to the location of the mobile communication device, for the validation of mobile advertising.